The Dumpster is the first of three commissioned projects that will be displayed at Artport and Tate Online in February and March 2006, each one meant to showcase net art as central to the conception of the museum as a networked, virtual institution. The text that follows is the first in a series of articles discussing each project.

The Dumpster is a portrait of romantic breakups that uses postings extracted from real blogs (short for “weblog” – online journals kept up by multiple commentators and meant for general public consumption), where teenagers’ relationships were discussed and in which one person has been “dumped” by another.

“Portrait” requires slight redefinition in this context, however. Net art is rarely representational, and in combining the romantic woes of over 20,000 web users, one can hardly expect a composite portrait of all of them. Yet a composite is exactly what Levin and his collaborators offer. Using interactive features combined with abstract imagery, The Dumpster illuminates the similarities, differences and patterns in these failed relationships resulting in both an analytic and sympathetic view of romantic hardship.

Upon entering the project, bubbles in shades of red, orange, brown and black float on a chiaroscuro background that fades from mauve to black. Click on a bubble, and an excerpt from a blog appears in a text box on the right-hand side of the screen.

The bubbles recall champagne happiness, celebration, even giddiness. They are cathartic in their movement, like a lava lamp. The bubbles convert to combinations of bright colors when the mouse cursor hovers over them, but the over-all color scheme is intentionally reflective of the Valentine’s day holiday – the date on which this project launched. Yet, the text reveals the opposite of revelry. Some of the language is angry (“me and tre are broke up f*** him I am finished with boys”), while some is more resigned or passive (“oh well what can you do about it?”). Ironically, one entry even recounts how a blogger was dumped via e-mail.

Each successive click on a bubble displays a new text box that appears underneath the last, and there is a string of dots connecting each text box to its relevant bubble. These connections and succession of boxes create a stream-of-consciousness dialogue. This digital art work shows us how all of us are linked together by our personal experiences of romantic pain.

The Dumpster uses ideas and themes common to net art. User interaction is essential to the work’s success, collaboration essential to its creation (Levin developed most of the interface while Kamal Nigam completed the data mining and analysis and filtering. Feinberg developed the server-side backend of the project.). Additionally, the work uses technology to explore social concerns, specifically, the process of the “social search” and its revelations as they relate to both the individual and the general net community.

In his critical essay “Social Data Browsing” which analyzes The Dumpster, Lev Manovich, Professor of Visual Arts, University of California, San Diego and a Director of The Lab for Cultural Analysis at California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, questions whether computer media can be used to create artistic representations that “link the individual and the social without subsuming one to the other.”

The question is relevant as it relates to current trends in the internet search field. Both Yahoo! and Google have launched test versions of applications that allow a “social search.” With these applications, users can create a personalized knowledge base or search engine by bookmarking and caching copies of their favorite sites and assigning them to categories in a structured way. Users can also search among their contacts’ knowledge base to obtain information that is more relevant to him or her personally versus mining information from a general internet search.

News reports published on news.com on June 28, 2005 explain that the new Yahoo! and Google applications were created to address three problems facing the online search market: Search engines like Yahoo! and Google have a limited ability to answer opinion-based queries (What is the best MP3 player?) with responses that capture the opinions of friends and authorities. Compounding this is their inability to interpret the meaning of a user query (i.e. search for Apple Records – the Beatles’ label- and you’ll likely get results for the more popular Apple Computers.)

Additionally, the new applications will connect users to new items that would be personally relevant, which today’s general searches cannot accommodate. For example, if a user has a history of searching fishing web sites and searched on the word “bass”, the search engine would return fish-related results; if music is the forte, the “bass” search would return information on musical instruments. Moving from the general to the specific, the personalized engine creates a portrait of the user and returns results reflective of the user’s interests.

Like Google and Yahoo!, The Dumpster takes a hefty amount of data search engine material and allows the user to whittle it down to something relevant to his or her own interest.

The data used in the project was provided by Intelliseek (a company that provides services that help other companies derive business and marketing strategies from data analysis) and mined using its BlogPulse search engine. Words and phrases indicative of break ups (i.e. “broke up,” “dumped me,” etc.) were entered into the engine and using custom language analysis software, the text of each post was evaluated to determine different characteristics of the break up.

Users navigate this data not in a structured manner, but horizontally, vertically and diagonally between the particular and the general. Gathering and displaying data in this fashion allows the user to navigate between the intimate details of both individual experiences and larger social groupings. Clicking randomly allows for exploration of individual experiences. Clicking on bubbles of a certain size or color exposes the experiences of a group.

The result is not only a portrait of teenage angst or a glimpse into the sociology of teenage romance; it is also further proof that consumer technologies and daily life have intertwined in complex ways.

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“The Battle of Algiers” is the second of three commissioned projects that will be displayed at Artport and Tate Online in February and March 2006. Each project showcases net art as central to the conception of the museum as a networked, virtual institution. The text that follows is the second in a series of articles discussing each project.

“The Battle of Algiers” re-composes scenes from the 1965 film of the same name by Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, which retells the story of the Algerian guerrilla struggle against the French colonists in the 1950s. It concentrates on the period between 1954-57, when freedom fighters regrouped and expanded only to succumb to systematic attempts by the French to dismantle their organization. Using algorithms to represent the logic of the nationalist tactics, the piece presents clips from the film in a varied pattern based on specific instructions and rules.

Monochromatic stills from the film fill squares of different sizes on the screen in seemingly random overlapping patterns: Algerians being shot in the street by soldiers, portraits of the main characters in the film, scenes from a cafe destroyed by the guerrilla’s bombs, rioting masses in the streets and the tanks meant to quell the violence.

Get past the violent imagery, and visually, the piece echoes minimalist artworks such as the grid and monochromatic palettes. The layering of images creates a kind of perspective and depth.

Various sound bites play in a loop as different images appear: sirens, machine gun fire, the wailing of Algerian women, jeep engines revving, explosions. French General Matheiu, the man with the plan for rooting out the rebels, repeats this important phrase over and over: “The structure of the Organization is a pyramid with sections composed of triangles.”

In the film, the general goes on to say that the purpose of this geometry is “that no partisan knows more than three members of the organization; his superior and two subordinates.” This structure makes it difficult for the French to determine who the masterminds of the Organization are. They must start at the bottom and piece the pyramid together, cell by cell, and work their way up to determine who is really in charge. The fact that the guerrillas are anonymous and unrecognizable in a crowd makes identifying participants and the connections between them that much harder.

Showing the incongruity and multiplicity inherent in the Organization’s pyramidal framework and cinematic processes in general is Lafia’s and Lin’s aim.

The artists use Pontecorvo’s piece precisely because it does not follow one character or one specific story, for the film’s entirety. Film as media provides the basis for their investigation. In a critical essay that accompanies the piece Daniel Coffeen, professor of rhetoric at UC Berkeley, points out that in a sense, films are computational. “Film is a database of images run together; images are chosen by a network of people – directors, editors, producers, screenwriters, etc.” he says. “We don’t see the modalities of the moving image, the multiple and varied directions implicit in film” because there’s only one screen and one story is projected.

The film does provide a timeline of events, and the general theme is Algeria’s struggle for liberation, but as it proceeds it reveals layer upon layer of overlapping characters and story lines that express a balanced and disquieting ambivalence towards acts of war.

At its beginning the film leads you to believe that this is a story about Ali la Pointe, one of the top three organizers of the nationalist Organization. As the film continues, the foci multiply – we are introduced to the Organization’s central players, those that interact or are impacted by it and the French Army. La Pointe’s story comes and goes; his eventual capture is anticlimactic and is not really the point of the story. Initially, we are lead to believe that la Pointe is the hero who opposes Mathieu the scoundrel, but concepts of good and evil are blurred. The nationalists and the French alike commit unspeakable acts for their cause, but at what expense?

As the French focus on individual triangular cells within the Organization, Lafia and Lin use individual film stills that echo the story lines and the structure of the Organization. The general timeline is removed and the “story” is determined by algorithms. There are connections, however. What happens in one part of the screen affects what happens in another, but the connections are not obvious because their sources are buried in code. A barrage of images and sounds is really all that remains – a commonality in the cinematic recreation of any war. Coffeen states, “[B]ecause the story line has been banished, [it] doesn’t mean the pathos of war is any less obvious.”

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